The Final Fantasy series learned hard into science fiction territory in the PS1 era, so IX was an attempt to return it to more fantasy-based fare while still retaining some of the darker themes and gameplay improvements of the later games. It worked quite well, I think; it's my favorite of the PS1 Final Fantasy games and probably my second favorite mainline game overall after 5. The only thing I dislike is that the minigames really suck; thankfully they're almost entirely optional and not tied to any major character improvements, unlike say, X or FF7 Rebirth.
I'm playing with the Memoria mod and the Moguri graphical enhancement pack. It's an unstable build so it tends to crash; thankfully it also autosaves so you don't lose a lot of progress when it does.
I forgot about this guy. Ran into him twice while doing some off-camera skill point farming.
Answer his questions correctly and you get money and items. Answering all 16 correctly gets you an achievement in the HD versions.
Honestly if the game has a major shortcoming it's that there's all these sidequests to do and the potential to become so absurdly powerful but the challenge just kind of stops being present once you hit level ~40 so it all feels a bit superfluous. Could really use a few superbosses, or maybe a harder difficulty setting.
Maybe that could be if they ever do a HD-2D remake, or something along the lines of the FF7 Remake series. This game would work a lot better for that format I think
